Post in evidenza

giovedì 24 aprile 2014

Pino Daniele (English Version)

A sunday of many years ago , Renzo Arbore announced for that episode of his TV show ("L'Altra Domenica", Rai 2) the debut of a young Neapolitan singer. This strange man, without many words, picked up his guitar in hand and sang "Na ' tazzullela ' and cafe ."
It was an emotional earthquake for all young Neapolitans like me.

He was on his second album, but the appearance marked the emergence of a new music and it confirmed the Arbore expertise and skill. The term 'new music' is not a coincidence because there was (still is) the experience of the Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare and then just Musicanova: they were both rooted in the research of the ancient music interpreted in a modern key.
Today it would be called world music.
We had only classical singer with classic songs belonging to the classical tradition.
We did not know that our music could be connected to some musical passages.
We did not understand that it was possible to sing in Neapolitan without using stereotypes, and to include social protests never neglecting a certain degree of melodies, conceived in a modern sense.
It was an epiphany of the modern music we were expecting, not only in Naples.

The songs from the first album, "Terra mia", were shocking: they upturned the way in which we hear Italian and Neapolitan music.
The next three albums were the link between tradition and modernity musical understandings at the international level. We loved the intersection among rock, blues. jazz and our melodies of the past.

Pino Daniele (Pinuccio, as we called him between us) was able to fracture a stagnant landscape but he was also able to (re)build a collective musical knowledge.
The nicest thing was then to know that Pinuccio was receiving a growing success throughout Italy, and soon became the artist we all acknowledge now.

His personal evolution led him to play and sing with and for the greatest musicians and performers and to become a producer too.
But that Sunday was truly a different Sunday .

I could not do a ranking of my favorites: surely these two are among those that go deeper....